Lacessit

The motivation is to leave an inheritance. And milk the pension system. No one needs a $20 million home. A $1 million home is sufficient for most people. Of course, there would then be tax on the income arising from investing the $19 million freed up. IMO it's pure greed.

There is asset rich, and there is asset ridiculously rich. In Australia, when people are eligible for the age pension, the family home is exempted from asset testing criteria. It is quite possible for a couple living in a $20 million mansion to be eligible for the full age pension. OTOH, a non-home owner with $947,500 in assets gets zero pension. IMO that's cockeyed, the couple in the mansion is extracting the urine.

I guess the dentists aren't complaining about RFK's appointment, because he's going to generate more work for them. I do wish RFK supporters would go on holiday in Afghanistan, to test the validity of his stance against vaccines. The Congo would be another good vacation spot.

Bureaucracies are worse than businesses because it is harder to weed out the clock watchers and slackers. It's also tough to avoid tossing out the baby - the valuable employees - with the bathwater, as they may be less pre-occupied with self-preservation. That's the dilemma Trump and his cohorts will have after January 20 - how to keep government functioning while they slash numbers. Having said that, IME the bigger a private company is, the more likely it is to accumulate competing bureaucracies, like maggots on a fly-blown sheep.

I would not say I am a "Rich Pensioner". Comfortable, in Thailand. A part pension plus investment income. I would be struggling in Australia. IMO I am entitled to any pension I can legally get, having worked for 45 years, and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. If you want to talk about money being wasted, ASIC is a prime example of costing investors millions of dollars due to its incompetence before, during and after the GFC. If it had been doing its job, I would not be drawing a part pension now. ASIC stands for Australian Securities and Investment Commission. To my knowledge, ASIC has never asked a single investor for input on their regulations. I'll give one example of ASIC's incompetence: Dr. John Hewson is a former Prime Ministerial aspirant, and respected financial commentator. In the early 2000's, he was chairman of Elderslie Finance Ltd. He advanced a loan of $70 million to one of the directors, Peter Alexis George, with terms undisclosed to investors and shareholders. George subsequently disappeared with the $70 million. To this day, his whereabouts are unknown. Hewson continued to tout Elderslie to investors, while knowing it was in financial difficulties. Elderslie collapsed in 2008. Receivers returned 2 cents in the dollar to investors about 6 years later, after pocketing juicy fees from the corpse. Hewson was never questioned by ASIC as to what collateral George advanced for the loan. Apparently there was none. AFAIK ASIC never tried to find George.

Why? The mutual admiration society is nauseating.

To correct some of the bull<deleted> that's posted.

My sister died last year of advanced liver cirrhosis. Teetotal. RIP. She was 11 years younger than me, obese for most of her life. Fits the profile of MASLD.

Someone pass me a bucket, please.

Exactly.

What the billionaires dodge in taxes is minuscule compared to the companies they run. Elon Musk pays no tax because he has no income. His wealth comes from the growth in capital value of shares in the companies he owns. In 2017 and 2018, Trump paid just $750 each year in income tax. Companies are taxed on their net profit. There is any number of profit-shifting and fake loan schemes to minimize net profit. What would be fair? A tax on revenue, personal AND companies. Revenue can't be shuffled off the books, or concealed. A bean counter in Australia calculated a 1.5% tax on revenue would see the government debt retired in a year, with ensuing years as gravy for infrastructure. I know I would have loved to pay 1.5% on my income when I was a working stiff. Taxes mostly hit the middle class, they don't realize how badly they are dudded.

I have no problem with work for the dole, it's the bureaucracy that bugs me. Picture yourself as a welfare recipient reporting in by phone, and having to hang on for hours listening to muzak, and chewing up their phone credit. I am supposed to report going overseas to Centrelink. After waiting for 45 minutes on the phone, I said screw it and hung up. Never heard from them afterwards, so it can't be that important.

Put simply, insurance companies are not climate denialists. They have entire departments dedicated to risk assessment. Information coming out now is that the water supply is adequate, most Los Angeles reservoirs are full. Being at a lower level, the pumps getting the water up to the Palisades wildfire area were unable to cope with demand. IMO at a wind speed of 100 km/hr, it is impossible if not suicidal to attempt to fight a wildfire.

Currently, humanity has warmed the oceans by 1.1 degrees C. That number might sound insignificant, but represents an unimaginable amount of energy. The Tsar Bomba is the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by man. It released an estimated 210 petajoules of energy. To warm the oceans by 1 degree C requires 5,730,000 petajoules, or approximately 273,000 Tsar Bombas. I haven't done the math, but I am guessing the result of warming the oceans by one more degree would result in winds of 300-500 km/hr.

I am reminded of when the Brits used to say " To be born British is to win the lottery of life". Apparently it sucks to be an American if you need pharmaceuticals to keep yourself alive. Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

I'm sure Trump will fix it for you. But wait, wasn't he going to do that in his first term?

Nothing in the environment? Microplastics are all through the world, they have even found plastics in the Marianas Trench, 11 km down. Microplastics have been found in the lungs, liver, spleen and kidneys. They would presumably be in the blood to get to the last three organs. They have also been found in breast milk. Plastics are full of additives - plasticizers, anti-oxidants, pigments and UV stabilizers. The plastic holding fibreglass textiles together to make insect screens contain lead oxide. Nobody knows what long term effects they might have. It's a long way from the first synthetic plastic, Bakelite, in 1910.

Maybe it's because no-one has heard of Thomas Sowell until now. Quite eminent, obviously. A guy who opposes gun control and supports decriminalization of drugs sounds schizophrenic to me. IME the people who talk about fiscal responsibility and tough love are the ones with the biggest tax breaks.

IIRC part of Trump's pitch during the campaign was to increase military spending.

I am not concerned about the new ones, they seem to be following the normal pattern of attenuation anyway. I have had two bouts of COVID, the second was after bivalent Moderna. In both cases, runny nose and sore throat for 3 days, no other effects such as loss of taste and smell, or fatigue. Everybody has their own take on what to do. Mine is to look upon COVID just like flu, another potentially dangerous respiratory disease with a jab every year. Although I must say the flu jabs are more effective in preventing infection. I've been having them for more than 40 years, and have not had flu once. Touch wood.

I don't think I have distanced myself from anyone who is not vaccinated; how would I know their status anyway, unless they told me? I have a friend who is a rabid anti-vaxxer. We just don't go there in conversation, because we both know it leads nowhere. Ironically, when we had COVID almost concurrently, I was mildly ill for 3 days. Pre-COVID, he would walk 15 km a day. Afterwards, for a month or so he could barely walk to his front gate.

I was being sarcastic in the first sentence. I would agree if one doesn't want to be vaccinated, they had better be fit with a normal BMI. A physio told me in my age group, I would be in the top 10% for fitness and mobility. Normal BMI. Having said that, I am in the most vulnerable cohort for COVID. It is simple common sense to get vaccinated. I have had two bouts of COVID. Both lasted no more than three days.

Got it, mRNA makes women more b!tchy. IME that doesn't stop them from getting pregnant.

So the vaccine made his appetite too healthy? Help me here, I'm losing count of the side-effects people are claiming. I've seen pregnancy mentioned, does mRNA make people randy?

According to the candidates themselves. Nobody seems to understand $38 trillion in debt at 5% pa interest is adding on almost $2 trillion every year, it's called compounding. Neither party has a mortgage on the claim of responsible economic managers. Whichever party is in power, they will simply print more money.